


Like a Bat-Family

by sanguinity



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Gen, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-14
Updated: 2017-01-14
Packaged: 2018-09-11 08:58:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8973223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/pseuds/sanguinity
Summary: This wasn't the first time Joan and Sherlock had pre-empted one of Martha's cleaning appointments to enlist her in an investigation, but they had never made such a dramatic production about it before.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Like Family](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8769061) by [beanarie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanarie/pseuds/beanarie). 



> Thanks to sans_patronymic for the info about what can be seen from the brownstone roof!

New Year's Day, Martha called out a friendly "Hallooooo!" as she let herself into the brownstone. She had only just locked the street door behind her when Sherlock came pelting down the staircase to meet her at the inner door.

"Ah, Ms. Hudson! We won't be requiring your services today. We will of course pay you for making the trip out."

"Sherlock!" Joan hissed, coming down the stairs on his heels.

He turned to glare at her. "This is a very bad idea, Watson."

"She's trustworthy…!"

Martha put her hands up. "Look, I don't mind, I can come back another day." She was familiar with this particular drill—it wasn't the first time that she had walked in on some mysterious doings that they didn't want her underfoot for—but this was the first time she'd seen them squabble about it. Usually it was simply one or both of them scrambling to intercept her at the door, and then standing there like a human wall of vague innocence, politely but firmly waiting for her to leave again.

Which she always did, of course. She never asked questions, either. She trusted in their judgement, Sherlock's and Joan's both, and if whatever was happening would go more smoothly without her in the building—or without her as a material witness—then she was happy enough to leave.

(The time she could hear and feel a series of explosions coming up through the floorboards beneath her feet, she was especially happy to leave.)

Joan and Sherlock were arguing silently with each other, a flurry of mulish mouths, jutted jaws, and raised eyebrows. Martha put her gloves back on.

Sherlock abruptly dropped his chin to his chest and heaved an aggrieved sigh, his hands tapping at the sides of his thighs unhappily. "Fine! On your heads be it."

Joan grinned brilliantly at him, and stepped forward to take Martha's elbow and pull her toward the stairs. Sherlock, his spine stiff with displeasure, stepped behind them to shut the inner door.

She heard him turn the lock.

Martha turned to stare at him: as far as she was aware, they never locked the inner door. He offered no explanation, but his chin still ducked, he theatrically extended his arm toward the staircase, indicating that Martha should precede him.

"What exactly is it that you want me to do?" she asked, as she began to climb. There were times that they had pre-empted a cleaning appointment to enlist her help in an investigation, but there had never been such a production about it before.

"Better that we show you," Joan said, urging her toward the stairs.

The brownstone was darker than it should be: many of the shutters had been closed, at both the front and the back of the building. Someone, most likely Joan, had already gathered up the worst of the party detritus from the night before. Despite Sherlock's very vocal frustration about the inefficiency of it, Joan was one of those women who cleaned for the housecleaner.

Then Martha saw who was standing on the third story landing, and she put her hand to her mouth to muffle her shriek of surprise.

Kitty stood there, shyly grinning at her. "Hello," she said, unrepentant about the shock she had just caused.

 _"Kitty!"_ Martha stage-whispered, abruptly mindful of the closed shutters and carefully locked door. Kitty wasn't even supposed to be in New York. The last Martha had heard, Kitty had been on the run from the NYPD. Perhaps ICE, too. Sherlock and Joan had been cagey about the particulars, but Martha had seen and heard enough during Kitty's stay in the brownstone to put a few things together on her own. Kitty's manner when she first arrived—untrusting, closed-off, incredibly shy of both men and being cornered—had spoken volumes about her past, and her agitation and panicky outbursts during the last few days before her disappearance had spoken even louder. Martha had known what case the three of them had worked on that last week—the murder board was always right there on the wall for anyone to read—and Detective Bell had let slip a thing or two when he had come around after to question Martha about Kitty's possible whereabouts. 

And Martha had read the newspapers during Del Gruner's trial, of course. 

"What do you need?" Martha asked, because she was unequivocally on Kitty's side in this. "How can I help?"

Beside her, Sherlock snorted. "Apparently this is a social call. Of all the frivolous reasons to come back to New York! It's as if I taught you _nothing."_ Martha could hear the unspoken _young lady_ on the end.

Kitty shrugged, obviously unconcerned by Sherlock's scolding. "I know how people get caught. I should, I do the catching."

The familiar pattern of sniping, Sherlock grouchy and Kitty sulkily defiant, reassured Martha that nothing must be too gravely amiss, notwithstanding the girl having spent the past year spent running from the police. "You left without a _word,"_ she scolded, and Kitty's eyes snapped back to Martha's. "You never call, you never write…!" Martha held out her hands in a gesture that didn't have to be interpreted as a request for a hug. 

It had been a year, after all. Anything might have happened.

But Kitty smiled wide, and stepped forward to put her arms tight around Martha's waist. Martha put her hands on Kitty's shoulders—the girl tended to recoil if Martha ever put her arms all the way around her—and squeezed her tight. "I worried about you," Martha said into the top of Kitty's head.

"You needn't have," Kitty insisted, pulling back. "I was fine."

But Martha caught Kitty's hands in her own. "And look at these! Are you chewing your nails again?"

"No," Kitty denied, although she clearly had been. "Or not much, anyway." She tugged a hand free and reached into her jacket pocket, then came out again with a bottle of black nail polish. "But on the way here I picked up this?" she added hopefully.

Sherlock made an indignant noise. "You're risking arrest by the NYPD to get your nails done? You realize you're making Watson and Ms. Hudson accessories."

Kitty rolled her eyes. "Which doesn't matter if I don't get caught, which I won't. I'm not an idiot, I waited to show myself until after Gregson and Bell were gone."

"You were in the house while Gregson and Bell were here—"

"On the _roof,"_ she corrected him.

"—where anyone might have come up to view the pyrotechnics and seen you—"

"—which no one did, and I was on top of the penthouse, anyway." She turned to Joan. "You throw very strange parties, by the way. You have that kind of view from the roof, and everyone watches the ball drop on TV?"

Joan threw her a distracted glance. "It was warmer inside. And Martha and I can decide for ourselves what risks we want to take," she added to Sherlock.

But Martha was already bored of the argument. She took the nail polish bottle from Kitty, and made a face. It was a cheap supermarket brand, of unknown opacity and dubious wear. "Oh, we can do better than this! I never took the blacks home again, you know," she said conspiratorially, and headed for the hall closet that still held all the miscellaneous nail supplies.

* * *

"Explain to me again why I have to do my nails, but Sherlock doesn't," Joan said later, when the three of them were comfortably set up in the media room. 

Most of the screens were showing one football game or another. Kitty was keeping an eye on the Cowboys—purely for professional reasons, she claimed—while Martha watched the Giants/Washington. The seventh screen was marathoning Dora the Explorer. "More than my job's worth, not to know what's going on with Dora," Kitty had explained, which was no explanation at all. 

"Sherlock doesn't like the fumes," Kitty answered Joan. Wherever she had spent the last year, Martha noted, there had been plenty of sun. There were sun-streaks in her hair—definitely not a salon job—a smattering of freckles across her nose, and pale skin beneath her jaw. 

Martha nodded. "I've helped him with his make-up, a time or two. Nails, too, sometimes. Pick a color," she instructed Joan, while she settled into preparing Kitty's cuticles.

Doing each other's nails had become something of a ritual during the months that Kitty had lived in the brownstone. The girl had been obviously touch-starved when she first arrived, but she was also incredibly skittish about touch. Sherlock was the only person she would allow anywhere near her, but Sherlock was so touch-averse himself—and meticulously careful of Kitty's physical space—that he could never be expected to supply the lack. Martha had set out to provide it herself, if the girl would let her.

She had begun small, asking for Kitty's assistance in repairing the polish on her dominant hand, which, truth be told, she struggled with doing herself. That touch-up coat of polish had required only minimal contact and had given all the control to Kitty: Martha's fingers laying passively across Kitty's, and the width of a table enforcing the distance between them. If there was a safer, smaller way to begin than that, Martha couldn't think of one.

But from that simple beginning, it had become this: Kitty sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Martha, readily giving her hand to Martha, so that Martha might push back her cuticles with an orange stick. 

"I like this one for you, Watson," Kitty said, pushing across a vibrantly red bottle with her free hand. 

_"Unequivocally Crimson,"_ Joan read dubiously. "Well, that's straightforward enough, I suppose. I'm never going to get that red out of my nail-beds, though."

Kitty rolled her eyes. "You're not supposed to paint your nail-beds."

"Did you say you spent the night on the roof?" Martha asked. "While we were all down here partying?"

"Made quite the entrance, too," Joan said. "I was clearing away bottles and nog cups this morning, and suddenly there she was, like Batman. Wearing a blanket for a cape, even."

"Eh, Batman," Kitty said dismissively. "I always preferred Batwoman. An independent operator, and she just up and takes the Batman brand name for herself, the backstory, the bat-signal, all of it, and turns it to her own purposes. No permission and no apologies."

"Well, you do like red," Joan allowed, pushing the Unequivocally Crimson back across the table to Kitty. "Maybe you should get the wig, too. No one will ever look at your face, all they'll remember is your hair."

"Where _are_ you now?" Martha asked, unable to stop herself. "You _are_ all right, aren't you?"

"I'm fine, I swear. It's probably best that I don't tell you, though, just in case you ever get dragged into this." But her eyes slid, meaningfully, to the Cowboys/Eagles game.

Someplace with a lot of sun. Of course. 

Joan shifted uncomfortably in her seat. "You shouldn't even be in the country, Kitty."

"It's fine," she insisted. "I know how this works. Like I said, I do the catching now."

"That's exactly what I mean. Working that closely with law enforcement? A false identity won't hold up forever."

"It's not false," Kitty said, not meeting Joan's eyes.

Joan inhaled sharply. "You're not... _Kitty._ You haven't! That's the first name anyone is going to think to associate with you!"

Kitty shook her head grimly. "Not here. In the UK, maybe, but that all was out of New York's jurisdiction, and none of it came up at the trial here. There's no one here who knows that name, outside of you, Sherlock, and Captain Gregson. And the captain isn't that interested in catching me. He didn't even put it on the warrant."

Joan sighed heavily and rubbed her temples.

"What name?" Martha asked, having missed something important somewhere.

"My name," Kitty said. "My _real_ name. I stopped using it after—" She took a deep breath, as if steeling herself to say something, and then she blew out her breath. "I stopped using it after."

If it was truly her real name, and not a deadname… Martha squeezed her hand gently. "I'm happy for you," she said quietly. "Getting to use your own name, that's a big deal."

 _"Thank you,"_ Kitty said, and threw a dirty look at Joan.

"Look, I'm not…" Joan began. "It's not _safe,_ and I want you to be safe, Kitty." She sighed. "I can still call you Kitty?"

"It's probably best that people here don't know the other one, just in case." She gave Martha an apologetic glance, and Martha patted her hand reassuringly. There was no need to worry on her account; she'd use whatever name Kitty wanted her to use.

"And anyway, 'Kitty'…" the girl continued. "It's what you three call me. I mean, you never minded that I call you 'Watson,' do you?"

Joan shook her head. "No. Watson is what you and Sherlock call me," she said, as if it was simple as that. And it was, really. Names always were. It was other people who made them complicated.

Martha had finished with Kitty's base coat, and she automatically reached for the matte black that Kitty favored. But Kitty pushed it aside and handed her a brilliant, outré vermillon, one that gleamed with gold shimmer. "I think I'll go with Batwoman this time."

"It suits you," Martha approved. "I always liked Oracle, myself. The librarian at the nerve center, feeding everyone all the information they need. The whole Bat-Family would fall apart without her."

"Which leaves me with, what, Batman?" Joan asked. She reached for the matte black that Kitty had passed over. At Kitty's surprised glance, she added defensively, "Well, I'm not anyone's sidekick!"

Sherlock appeared at the door just then, with a tea tray laid for three. He formally set it at the end of the table. Kitty slid Martha a look. _"Alfred,"_ she whispered, and all three of them cracked up into giggles.

Sherlock sighed, his mouth turned down with disapproval. "Yes, I have a British accent, as do you, it's all very comical. Watson? If I may speak with you, please?"

Joan excused herself, and Kitty watched them go. Once they were well and gone, she crooked a finger at Martha, and whispered a name in her ear.

Martha sat back, turning the name over to herself. The name, and Kitty's willingness to reclaim it—she had come so far, since Martha had first met her—and her further willingness to entrust Martha with it. She bit her lip until she had her emotions under control. "Thank you," she said.

Kitty shrugged. "Well, you're Oracle, aren't you? When the time comes, you're the one who has to know how to reach everyone."


End file.
